Sunday 19 September 2010

'NEW ACCUMULATION'



This is a collaboration with Sara Magenheimer, a video-loop called 'New Accumulation', recently premiered at the Berkley Museum BAM/PFA L@te series. The footage is a time-lapse documentation of something Sara had made previously- a mesh-like pattern using colorful string drawn between trees.

I thought the time-lapse approach was a neat way of capturing a piece that was more of a process than a product. The style also suggested a sense of surveillance that Sara and I had become interested in during an earlier collaboration, 'Through The Trees, Through the Glass" .

The soundtrack tries to take some of these ideas on board: the first minute (before the string enters) uses a chop-up-collage based on the original audio from the footage (ambient sounds, conversation between Sara and her husband Eben, and low res media 'hiss', in fraction-of-a-second slices).

For the next section, a piece for woodwind sextet and FM synth. The idea was to compose something with an 'additive' process similar to that of the sculpture- with roughly one measure per frame of the footage, the harmonic and timbral 'colors' increasing in density with the addition of more orange strings. An attempt at 'time-lapse' music.

(Thanks to Caroline Weeks on alto flute, and Rupert Noble for the use of his workshop- and all those instruments in it!)

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